Origins of the American Civil War (3/4)
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| Origins of the Civil War
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Allan Nevins, in his eight volume Ordeal of the Union, argued that the Civil War was an "irrepressible" conflict. Nevins synthesized contending accounts emphasizing moral, cultural, social, ideological, political, and economic issues. In doing so, he brought the historical discussion back to an emphasis on social and cultural factors. Nevins correctly points out that the North and the South were rapidly becoming two different peoples. At the root of these cultural differences was the problem of slavery, but fundamental assumptions, tastes, and cultural aims of the regions were diverging in other ways as well.
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2 The fragmentation of the American party system |
The reactionary South
Southern politics and slavery
For further details please see Slavery in North America.
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At the center of the two diverging societies were differences in labor systems. The plantation system, in effect, determined the structure of Southern society. By 1850 there may have been fewer than 350,000 slaveholders in a total white population of about six million. Within this group, only a small minority owned the majority of slaves: perhaps seven percent of slaveholders owned roughly three-quarters of the slave population. This small minority, who constituted a class of plantation-owning elite known as "slave magnates," were small enough as to be comparable to the millionaires of the following century. Poor whites or "plain folk" (who resorted at times to eating clay) were outside the market economy. Many of the small farmers with a few slaves and yeomen were on its periphery.
Although those who had a proprietary interest in slavery (i.e. the plantation and slave owners) were a very small minority, slave labor was not on the brink of internal collapse due to moves for democratic change initiated from the region itself. Small farmers in the South generally accepted the political leadership of the slave magnates and embraced hysterical racism; they were thus unlikely agents for internal democratic reforms in the South. Moreover, even poor whites and "plain folk" would often rally to the cause of slavery's most militant defenders. For one, small farmers depended on local planter elites for access to cotton gins, for markets for their feed and livestock, and for loans. In many areas, there were also extensive networks of kinship linking whites of varying social castes. The poorest resident of a county might easily be a cousin of the richest aristocrat, thus explaining why the South would come to defend its "peculiar" institution as the cornerstone of its way of life.
By the 1850s Southern slaveholders felt increasingly encircled psychologically and politically. Increasingly dependent on the North for manufactured goods, for commercial services, and for loans, and increasingly cut off from the flourishing agricultural regions of the Northwest, they now faced the prospects of a growing free labor and abolitionist movement in the North.
Earlier, however, Southern planters had been largely content in the Union, barring occasional grumbles, such as the "South Carolina Exposition and Protest" (1828). The fundamental reason, of course, was the unwillingness of the federal government to take a stand against slavery, given the dominance of the increasingly pro-Southern Democratic party.
The Democrats, meanwhile, were the nation's majority party, usually controlling Congress, the presidency, the courts, and many state offices, and the party fostered alliances between Southern planters and Northern Democrats. As a result, until the watershed election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, slaveholders were able to prevail in more and more of the nation's territories and to garner a great deal of influence over national policy.
The expansion of the nation westward made it seem for the time, under President Jackson in the 1830s, that agrarian principles ("Jeffersonian democracy" and "Jacksonian democracy") - in practice an absolute minimum of central authority and a tendency to favor debtors over creditors - had won a permanent victory over those of Alexander Hamilton.
On economic policy, for example, Southerners hailed Jackson's work to dismantle the Bank of the United States, which had been originally introduced in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton as a way of providing for national debt and increasing the power of the federal government. Another example of strong Southern influence was the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which ended the Nullification crisis. Moreover, the South's sway over the judicial branch was perhaps even greater. In 1835 Roger Taney succeeded John Marshall as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. For roughly three decades, the Taney Court asserted the principle of social responsibility for private property - the basis for upholding fugitive slave laws. Finally, even in the realm of foreign policy, the Wilmot Proviso (1847) and the Ostend Manifesto (1854) were examples of strong Southern influence.
With the outcry over developments in Kansas strong in the North, defenders of slavery - increasingly committed to a way of life that much of the rest of the nation considered obsolete - shifted to a militant pro-slavery ideology that would lay the groundwork for secession upon the emergence of Lincoln.
Southerners waged a vitriolic response to political change in the North. Slaveholding interests sought to uphold their constitutional rights in the territories and to maintain sufficient political strength to repulse "hostile" and "ruinous" legislation.
Behind this shift was the growth of the cotton industry, which left slavery more important than ever to the Southern economy. Coloring this shift and heightening its intensity, it was imbued with a pattern of ideological response and counter-response between the two sections.
Reactions to slave revolts such as the heroic Nat Turner uprising (1831), the popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851), and the growth of the abolitionist movement (pronounced after Garrison's establishment of the Liberator in 1831) inspired an elaborate intellectual defense of slavery.
J.D.B De Bow established De Bow's Review, the leading Southern magazine warning the planter class about the dangers of depending on the North economically. De Bow's Review emerged as the leading voice for secession. The magazine emphasized the South's economic inequality, relating it to the concentration of manufacturing, shipping, banking, and international trade in the North. Frantically searching for Biblical passages endorsing slavery, and conjuring up economic, sociological, historical, and scientific arguments, slavery went from being a "necessary evil" to a "positive good." Foreshadowing modern totalitarian thought, especially Nazism, Dr. J.H. Van Evrie's book Negroes and Negro slavery: The First an Inferior Race: The Latter Its Normal Condition — setting out the arguments the title would suggest — was an attempt to apply scientific analysis.
Latent sectional divisions suddenly activated derogatory sectional imagery, which would emerge into full-blown sectional ideologies. As industrial capitalism gained momentum in the North, Southern writers emphasized whatever aristocratic traits they valued (but often did not practice) in their own society: courtesy, grace, chivalry, the slow pace of life, orderly life, and leisure. This supported their argument that slavery provided a more humane society than industrial labor. The most influential exponent of this argument was undoubtedly George Fitzhugh. In his Cannibals All!, Fitzhugh argued that the antagonism between labor and capital in a free society would result in "robber barons" and "pauper slavery," while in a slave society such antagonisms were avoided. He advocated enslaving Northern factory workers, for their own benefit. Lincoln, on the other hand, denounced such Southern insinuations that Northern wage earners were fatally fixed in that condition for life. To free soilers, the stereotype of the South was one of a diametrical opposite, static society in which the slave system maintained an entrenched aristocracy.
The militant defense of slavery
Slave "patrollers," mostly poor whites, were given the authority to stop, search, whip, maim, and even kill any slave who violated the slave codes. Abolitionists cited the slave codes as example of the barbarism of Southern society.The fragmentation of the American party system
See also Dred Scott v. Sandford.
However, as the Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum in the North, the pro-Southern Democratic party was increasingly seen as a barrier to progress in the areas of transportation, tariffs, schooling, and banking policy. Moreover, as modern capitalist development transformed the economy and society in the North, the corresponding rise of mass politics undermined the stability of the old two-party system. Sectional ideologies grew more and more vitriolic after 1856, and the growth of mass politics allowed these sentiments to enter politics with the help of the pamphlets, speeches, and newspaper articles by the Republican radicals. Sectional tensions - once merely an elite concern - were now increasingly tinged mass ideologies of free-soil and free-labor. Even the Constitution was now emerging as a source of division; in 1857 the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford highlighted the ambiguity of the Constitution, undermining the unifying force that the nationalistic veneration of Constitution had provided.
Although indispensable mechanisms for regulating the balance of power between sectional interests in politics were being considerably eroded, revisionist historians, such as Randall and Craven, have argued that their repair would not have been out of the question had the nation been led by a more able generation of politicians. Most notably, the controversy over the Lecompton constitution in 1858 offered the best opportunity for an alliance between the moderate-to-conservative wing of the Republican Party and anti-administration Southerners.
President Buchanan decided to end the troubles in Kansas by urging Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton constitution. Kansas voters, however, soundly rejected this constitution - at least with a measure of widespread fraud on both sides - by more than 10,000 votes. As Buchanan directed his presidential authority to this goal, he further angered the Republicans and alienated members of his own party. Prompting their break with the administration, the Douglasites saw this scheme as an attempt to pervert the principle of popular sovereignty on which the Kansas-Nebraska Act was based. Nationwide, conservatives were incensed, feeling as though the principles of states' rights had been violated. Even in the South, ex-Whigs and border states Know-Nothings - most notably John Bell and John C. Crittenden (key figures in the event of sectional controversies) - urged the Republicans to oppose the administration's moves and take up the demand that the territories be given the power to accept or reject sovereignty.
As the schism in the Democratic party deepened, moderate Republicans argued that an alliance with anti-administration Democrats, especially Stephen Douglas, would be a key advantage in the 1860 elections. Some Republican observers saw the controversy over the Lecompton constitution as an opportunity to peal off Democratic support in the border states, where FrÃÂémont picked up little support. After all, the border states had often gone for Whigs with a Northern base of support in the past without prompting threats of Southern withdrawal from the Union.
Among the proponents of this strategy was the New York Times, which called on the Republicans to downplay opposition to popular sovereignty in favor of a compromise policy calling for "no more slave states" in order to quell sectional tensions. The Times maintained that for the Republicans to be competitive in the 1860 elections, they would need to broaden their base of support to include all voters who for one reason or another were upset with the Buchanan administration.
Indeed, pressure was strong for an alliance that would unite the growing opposition to the Democratic administration. But such an alliance was no novel idea; it would essentially entail transforming the Republicans into the national, conservative, Union party of the country. In effect, this would be a resurrection of the Whig party.
The radicals, however, staunchly opposed any attempts to modify the Republican position on slavery. Radicals were appalled by what they considered a surrender of their principles when, for example, all the ninety-two Republican members of Congress voted for the Crittenden bill. Although this compromise measure prevented Kansas' entry into the union as a slave state, the fact that it called for popular sovereignty, rather than outright opposition to the expansion of slavery, was deeply troubling to the free-labor radicals.
In the end, the Crittenden bill did not forge a grand anti-administration coalition of Republicans, ex-Whig Southerners in the border states, and Northern Democrats. Instead, the Democratic Party merely spit along sectional lines. In a desperate move to reassert control over his party, Buchanan applied the patronage whip ruthlessly. Anti-Lecompton Democrats complained that a new, pro-slavery test had been imposed upon the party. The Douglasites, however, refused to yield to administration pressure. Like the anti-Nebraska Democrats, who were now members of the Republican Party, the Douglasites insisted that they - not the administration - commanded the support of most northern Democrats.
As the Southern planter class saw its stranglehold over the executive, legislative, and judicial apparatus of the central government wane, and as it grew increasingly difficult for Southern Democrats to manipulate power in many of the Northern states through their allies in the Democratic Party, extremist sentiment in the region hardened dramatically.
As the Democrats were grappling with their own troubles, radicals in the Republican party fought against the idea of "non-extension" and fought to keep the issue of slavery in the West, which allowed them to mobilize a great deal of popular support, at the focal point of political discourse. Chase wrote Sumner that if the conservatives succeeded, it might be necessary to recreate the Free Soil party. He was also particularly disturbed by the tendency of many Republicans to eschew moral attacks on slavery for political and economic arguments.
As a caveat, it is important to note that the controversy over slavery in the West was still not creating a fixation on the issue of slavery. Although the old restraints on the sectional tensions were being eroded with the rapid extension of mass politics and mass democracy in the North, the perpetuation of conflict over the issue of slavery in the West still required the efforts of certain Democrats in the South and radical Republican politicians in the North. They had to ensure that the sectional conflict would remain at the center of the political debate.
William Seward, in fact, contemplated this potential as far back as the 1840s, when the Democrats were the nation's majority party, usually controlling Congress, the presidency, and many state offices. At the time, the country's institutional structure and party system allowed slaveholders to prevail in more and more of the nation's territories and to garner a great deal of influence over national policy. With growing popular discontent with the unwillingness of many Democratic leaders to take a stand against slavery, and growing consciousness of the party's increasingly pro-Southern stance, Seward became convinced that the only way for the party to counteract the Democrats' strong monopoly of the rhetoric of democracy and equality was for the Whigs to embrace anti-slavery as a party platform. Once again, to increasing numbers of Northerners, the Southern labor system was increasingly seen as contrary to the ideals of American democracy.
Republicans believed in the existence "the Slave Power Conspiracy," which had seized control of the federal government and was attempting to pervert the Constitution for its own purposes. The "Slave Power" idea gave the Republicans the anti-aristocratic appeal with which men like Seward had long wished to be associated politically. By fusing older anti-slavery arguments with the idea that slavery posed a threat to Northern free labor and democratic values, it enabled the Republicans to tap into the egalitarian outlook which lay at the heart of Northern society.
In this sense, during the 1860 Presidential campaign, Republican orators even cast "Honest Abe" as an embodiment of these principles, repeatedly referring to him as "the child of labor" and "son of the frontier," who had proved how "honest industry and toil" were rewarded in the North. Although Lincoln had been a Whig, the "Wide Awakes" (members of the Republican clubs), used replicas of rails that he had split to remind voters of his humble origins.
In almost every northern state, the radicals attempted to have a Republican party or an anti-Nebraska fusion movement organized in 1854. The groundswell of popular clamor fed by the issue of free soil, however, was powerful enough to thwart these aims. Conservatives were not able to ensure the nomination of a candidate regarded as moderate enough in the South so as to not inspire the secession of Southern states in 1860. In areas where the radicals controlled the new organization, the comprehensive radical program became the party policy. Just as they helped organize the Republican Party in the summer of 1854, the radicals played an important role in the national organization of the party in 1856. Republican conventions in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois adopted radical platforms. Republican platforms in such radical states as Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, and Vermont usually called for the divorce of the government from slavery, the repeal of the fugitive slave law, and no more slave states, as did platforms in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Massachusetts when radical influence was high.
Conservatives at the Republicans' 1860 nominating convention in Chicago were able to block the nomination of the radical William Seward. More significantly, conservatives were unable to bring about the resurrection of "Whiggery." The convention's resolutions regarding slavery were roughly the same as they had been in 1856. Non-extension was defeated. In the following months, Republican conservatives like Tom Ewing and Edward Baker voiced public objections which declared that the normal condition of territories was freedom. All in all, the radicals had done an effective job of shaping the official policy of the Republican Party.
Southern slaveholding interests now faced the prospects of a Republican president and the entry of new free states that would alter the nation's balance of power between the sections. To many Southerners, the resounding defeat of the Lecompton constitution foreshadowed the entry of more free states into the Union. Dating back to the Missouri Compromise, the region desperately sought to maintain an equal balance of slave states and free states so as to be competitive in the Senate. Continuing this tradition was growing more and more unlikely.
The Republicans and anti-administration Democrats
For further details see Lecompton constitution, Stephen Douglas, and James Buchanan.
President James Buchanan
The internal structure and character of the Republican Party
Willam H. Seward
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